As reported on Wired, Bram Cohen, the inventor of BitTorrent and some other people are about to launch a BitTorrent search service.

The article discusses the question of whether Cohen could be sued for indexing illegal content. A professor at Stanford Law School assumes that probably the MPAA cannot sue Cohen’s robot that automatically indexes the material but they could flood Cohen’s company with cease and desist letters (something like a physical denial of service attack against Cohen). This sounds quite probable to me.

I predict that as a result Cohen’s search service and other centralized services that use BitTorrent will introduce a content format that enables publishers to bundle content with a license (e.g. a CreativeCommons license) and other Metadata (e.g. Work Identifier).

Interoperable DRM will be introduced by the Digital Media Users (Creators and End-Users) in order to defend their Traditional Rights and Usages against the the offenses of the old media industry .

Die vorliegende Vertiefung in der Landschaft wird im Volksmund “de Muer” genannt. Es handelt sich um eine Art Mardelle deren Fläche früher doppelt so gross war wie heute.

Als Moor bezeichnet man eigentlich eine stehende Wasseroberfläche auf schweren Ton- oder/und Lehmböden. Es hat einen niedrigen Wasserstand und einen sumpfigen Uferbereich. In ihm bleibt das Wasser das ganze Jahr über stehen, kann jedoch, wie hier, während den Sommermonaten auch schon mal austrocknen.

“De Muer” ist ein Lebensraum für Amphibien wie Salamander, Molche, Kröten und Frösche, die besonders zur Fortpflanzung an das Wasser gebunden sind. Es wird außerdem von Enten angeflogen, vom Wild zur Wasseraufnahme aufgesucht und von Wildschweinen zum Schlammbad genutzt. Im Frühling umgibt ein Teppich aus weißen Buschwindröschen (Anemonen), durchsetzt mit gelben Blüten von Schlüsselblume und Scharbockskraut das “Muer”. Schwärme von Insekten schwirren über der Wasseroberfläche.

“Es ist der Ort, an dem die Prinzessin den Frosch geküßt hat”, so berichtet das Märchen.

Wellenreitende Enten

In his criticism of the DMP specifications Ed Felten writes:

The documents describe a world unlike the one we actually live in. They do this, mostly, by redefining words that we all understand, creating improved versions that are distinguished typographically by capitalization.

Exactly! The world in which we (human beings) actually live in is the analogue world (physical space). The DMP specifications describe a possible model how Users (human beings identified by their Devices) interact in the digital world (logical space). DMP does not claim that the DRM specs describe the physical world.

All of this is done with little if any reference to copyright law. There is plenty of talk about “protection” and “intellectual property” and, of course, Rights. But not much is said about the actual scope of copyright law or its correspondence to the structure of DMP-World.

Good point! The DMP specifications are copyright agnostic. The technology based on it’s Tools based on it could be misused for taking away our fundamental liberties as media users (e.g. fair use), but it could also be used for protecting our traditional rights and usages (TRUs).

Legislation will decide which DRM Tools and applications are legal and which are illegal. The publically available specification of a DRM system may prevent that such a decision is made behind the doors by some media monopolists. The traditional rights of media users (TRUs) are the link between the rights (of users in the analogue space) and the Rights (of Users in the digital space).

Was macht man, wenn man gelangweilt auf das Flugzeug nach Berlin wartet und ein offenes Wlan findet?

As long as bundling content and technology (walled gardens) are economically more rewarding I doubt that the leading consumer electronics vendors and major content owners will invest in interoperability and true convergence.

My guess is that other value-chain-users (including independent creators, producers, content aggregators, distributors, and of course end-users) will invest in interoperability, because for the majority of the value-chain-users independence of content and technology has a benefit.

For some time new profitable services based on interoperable DRM will probably coexist with traditional DRM systems offered by the “old entertainment economy” (I still remember the time when AOL and Compuserve discussed whether they should introduce “gateways” to the Internet).

Open Media Network is a free public service “designed to help you enjoy a broad selection of movies, public TV and radio, video blogs and podcasts while protecting producer’s copyrights”.

I am asking myself what the business model of OMN will be. At the moment their website is a promotion tool for Kontiki which is more than yet-another-p2p.

Kontiki, a five-year-old startup led by Netscape veterans, harnesses distributed file transfer technique best-known for facilitating piracy by BitTorrent software users for large television and film files. Kontiki adds a centralized “curator”, security, and Microsoft DRM. After being used for corporate video, indie film releases, and movie trailers, Kontiki set up a widely publicized BBC trial last summer to deliver TV and radio in the United Kingdom, and has been working with the Open Media Network public TV and radio initiative to distribute content from RSS aggregation with Creative Commons licenses

The interesting point is that Kontiki includes DRM. I suppose that the objective of the Kontiki founders is to provide the payment infrastructure for content creators who want to license their content to End-users, not necessarily for free.

There is a European counterpart to Kontiki: Gnabis a P2P network complemented with DRM promoted by Bertelsmann’s Arvato-Mobile. The Arvato technology is based on Microsoft DRM and standards developed within the DLNA. Arvato cooperates with Intel on Gnab – it can be expected that Intel powered devices (handhelds, mobile phones,…) will support the Arvato P2P network and DRM.

Now we could ask ourselves what the business strategy of Arvato/Gnab could be?

• set up a platform like OMN to promote their P2P network/ DRM solution
• get a critical mass of early adaptors for the service (create awareness)
• team up with Intel and Microsoft to develop and sell End-user devices for the Gnab network (similar to Apple’s iPod strategy)
• license Bertelsmann content (e.g. music videos) excluselively for Gnab
• use promotion power to direct the mainstream End-users to subscribe to Gnab services
• support “majors” to maintain control over their distribution monoplies?

The Content Industry, Intel,…then TCPA/Palladium is not far… DRM/TCPA will be reality in CE Devices and nobody will prevent it in the short term, so we should *use* it. Now everything is a mixture of device/transport/content. So “they” may play on the whole : hardware and services. And Apple has taken the lead with iPod(hardware)/iTunes(services).

The entertainment industry (e.g. Sony, Bertelsmann…) don’t want to loose their distribution monopolies to device manufacturers like Apple. Up to now they could dictate the conditions of licensing contracts for artists on the creation side of the value-chain. On the other side they have their cartels to keep up retail prices for CDs and DVDs and they had some influence on End-user device technologies (e.g. DVD-CCA).

By keeping their control over the distribution monopolies in the digital space (e.g. Gnab P2P) the “entertainment industry” strives to maintain control over the “entertainment market”. P2P (Napster) has been a threat to their distribution monopolies, but first of all filesharing of copyrighted content is illegal and secondly there is no functioning business model for P2P (an artist cannot *sell* DRM-free content over the internet to “mainstream” users).

P2P combined with DRM will enable artists to sell content on the internet to “mainstream” users. Now the question is whether:

• (a) the P2P network operators will set the license conditions for distribution
• (b) artists and end-users will negotiate the prices directly

The “entertainment industry”’s intention is that scenario (a) will succeed and therefore they are interested in services that license content to their device/hardware/transport platform according to *their* licensing conditions and business models (instead of Apple setting the licensing conditions for the iTunes platform).

“Internet Activists” believe that DRM is wrong (it contradicts the nature of data) and the entertainment industry will loose. They may be right in but in the next five to ten years this will not prevent the entertainment industry to deploy the internet for their business purposes. And the many musicians who license their rights to Collective Management Societies (e.g. GEMA) prove that there is a need to be paid for intellectual property.

I also believe that DRM is wrong and a world where people pay fair prices for content would be much better. Unfortunately the world is full of people who don’t pay for things they can get for free (that’s what I call the “mainstream” users). And this is where DRM can offer alternatives.

My intention is that interoperable DRM can be used to deploy my scenario (b) where artists control their businesses (e.g. by licensing their content under a Creative Commons License). The P2P/DRM platform would simply provide the technical platform and the services (e.g. hosting of the content, indexing,…) to artists and end-users.